In so much of his music, Prince seemed fixated on contradictions. He used the album format to position seemingly alienated concepts against each other—spirituality and sexuality, of course, but also isolation and collaboration, minimalism and maximalism, life and afterlife. He longed to connect these ideas, to isolate the points at which they melted into each other. The soundtrack for his 1984 movie Purple Rain represented the most precise implosion of his internal contradictions—sex, religious devotion, empathy, alienation. The album is a kind of geode of identity, a product of remarkable individual pressurization.
Purple Rain — Deluxe Expanded Edition is the first reissue produced by the deal Prince signed with Warner Brothers in 2014 in order to regain ownership of his masters. This edition’s approach to the original LP is to kind of unfold it from the edges by including unreleased songs and extended mixes that both expand and complicate the record’s essential character. Purple Rain was Prince’s commercial flashpoint, an album- and feature-length metaphor for his arrival on a national stage; in the last 33 years, it has been written about breathlessly (Carvell Wallace reconsidered it here just last year, one of a series of reviews published after Prince’s death), and it has been contemplated down to its skeletal details. The remastering job heard on this edition, apparently overseen by Prince, adds a clarity and fluorescence to an album whose elements already sounded carefully distributed. Prince’s screams in “Baby I’m a Star” take shape in three dimensions, and the interlaced guitar lines in “Darling Nikki” sound as if they're radiating their own humidity. The songs feel heavier and fuller and conversely, the void surrounding the guitar chord that introduces the title track feels as if it’s been expanded into an even vaster loneliness.
As good as the remaster sounds, the primary attraction of this edition is its second disc, 11 tracks from Prince’s vault of unreleased songs, all cut between 1983 to 1984. Prince wrote and recorded constantly for his entire career, and only a fraction of his music has found its way onto his official records. He only issued two archival compilations in his lifetime, 1998’s Crystal Ball and 1999’s The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale, where many of the songs recovered from the archives were altered, remixed, or re-recorded. Original versions of vault songs have tended to circulate among Prince fans through bootlegs or live recordings, where they would appear full of crackling and hissing artifacts, or would seem to be playing from a considerable distance, muted and cottony, as if they had barely escaped their source. (My bootleg mp3 copy of the 12-minute “Computer Blue” only occasionally verges on listenable.) On the Deluxe Edition of Purple Rain, the vault tracks sound like fully-formed Prince songs—animated, vibrant, reflexive, fluid, almost vehicular in their design and velocity, as if the motorcycle on the album cover were sculpted according to the songs’ sleek and slightly alien shapes. Whether Prince is constructing busy hydraulic cylinders of funk (“Love and Sex”) or drawing a few scribbles in empty space (“We Can Fuck”), one hears every detail with a previously inaccessible focus.
There’s a playfulness that animates tracks performed entirely by Prince; “Electric Intercourse,” a decaying piano ballad in the mold of “The Beautiful Ones,” is sung almost entirely in the unstable region between his falsetto and his scream. On “Possessed,” his vocal seems to never reach the earth, weaving a sinuous arc through the air. “Gosh, I love it when the horns blow,” he says just before the breakdown, “Everybody watch me dance!”; the drums recede and the “horns” turn out to be a synth figure pulsing in the center of a vacuum. But as much as Purple Rain is the sound of Prince achieving critical and commercial supremacy, it’s also the sound of his band, the Revolution, solidifying as a unit, reshaping Prince’s music as they played it. The best of the unreleased songs either feel intended for the Revolution or involve them directly, seeming to form their compositions out of the electric and ambiguous flow of the band’s interplay.
Among the most startling moments in this vein is found on “Our Destiny / Roadhouse Garden,” when the strings and drums evaporate and Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman says, “Look, I’m not saying let’s get married or nothing, I’m not ready to settle down, and I don’t want to have your baby, but you’ve got to be the finest specimen I’ve ever seen.” Prince, Lisa, and Wendy Melvoin share buoyant harmonies on the perfectly-named “Wonderful Ass,” in which subject of the song is so lost in peripheral distractions (“You do not understand my quirky ways/My crazy logic leaves you in a daze/You think my neurosis is just a phase”) that the chorus— “You’ve got a wonderful ass”—almost feels like a non-sequitur. The complete, 12-minute version of “Computer Blue,” the only song on Purple Rain credited to Prince, Wendy, and Lisa, digresses into a series of melting guitar solos, and then again into a more formal funk exercise, and then dissolves further from there into a kind of short story, told by Prince, in which he describes someone who lives in a house with many hallways. “It was a long walk to his bedroom,” Prince says, “because to him each hallway represented an emotion, every one vastly different from the next.” He assigns each hallway its appropriate emotional designation: “lust,” “fear,” “insecurity,” and finally, “hate.”
The most revelatory track from the vault is “We Can Fuck,” which appeared later in a different form as “We Can Funk” on the soundtrack for Prince’s movie Graffiti Bridge. To listen to the Graffiti Bridge version and then to its original 10-minute arrangement is to hear the song unfold backwards through time. Prince worked on the song from 1983 to 1990, adding and subtracting different textures; the Graffiti Bridge version is ultimately aided by George Clinton, a horn section, and an additional chorus which aligns the song with the more communal design of a Parliament-Funkadelic song. The original “We Can Fuck,” however, gets so deep into Prince territory that its pre-breakdown section ends with him arranging his voice into harmonized screams. “Oh, the Kama Sutra,” he sings against a slowly developing groove that eventually consumes the entire song, “I can rewrite it in half as many words.” It builds and falls apart and builds again, synths whirling and floating with the choreography of leaves, flowing around Prince’s multiplied voice and transforming what once felt like a minor funk digression into one of his best tracks. Its placement, before Prince’s somber and sinuous recording of a piano piece his dad wrote (“Father’s Song”), gives the second disc the integrity of a lost Prince album, one in which the listener seems to follow him beyond his hits and even his album-length statements, to the very edges of his sensibility.
The third disc of the set focuses on another dense layer of Prince’s discography, the 12-inch mixes that considerably expand and warp the shape of his singles. Where extended versions of songs initially served a utilitarian purpose for DJs—longer versions of songs allowed for more relaxed and precise transitions—Prince saw the space afforded by a 12-inch as a kind of Möbius strip; his extended remixes tend to drift and twist away from themselves as they go. Listening to these songs, one has the feeling of rocketing through membranes, the compositions always opening up onto some new internal space. “Erotic City,” a B-side that inadvertently ascended into radio playlists, is stretched out into seven-and-a-half minutes of sheer mechanical austerity in its “Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive” mix, where the composition is often reduced to synthetic and percussive blinks, vocals curving through the empty space between each snare. The extended remix of “I Would Die 4 U” is 10 minutes long and weirdly doesn’t play at all with the original recording’s texture; it’s a live performance taken from one of the Revolution’s rehearsals. The song builds relentlessly, always seeming to unlock an extra room of itself, particularly when Eddie M’s saxophone starts fluttering through the substance of the track.
The third disc also includes single edits, which are less imaginative and constantly unfolding than they are extremely, arbitrarily folded down. Prince reportedly prepared at least 100 songs for Purple Rain, so the new set is hardly comprehensive, and one wonders what else could’ve been included in lieu of a 7-inch edit of “Take Me with U.” The reissue specifically lacks “Wednesday,” which appeared on one of the earliest configurations of the Purple Rain tracklisting, as well as the full 11-minute version of the title track, performed at a 1983 show at First Avenue, out of which Prince carved the album version.
That legendary concert was the Revolution’s first show with Melvoin; she plays “Purple Rain”’s central chord progression, engineering and manipulating all of the emptiness around it. In the narrative flow of the album and film, which migrates from desire to jealousy to personal and professional breakdown, Prince finally embraces an expression of empathy, which also seems to flow inexorably from all of the previous expressions. There’s no radical shift in structure in the 11-minute recording; it just sort of wanders through its changes forever, one’s sense of time dislocating around it. In the center of the performance, Prince’s concerns about beginnings and endings, of birth and death seem to dissolve and fold into its ambulatory drift. This is Prince’s afterworld, the timeless space he sought to access in his own music, and it’s as close as he ever got to portraying it in performance and on record.
